by Jane Ridley
In London, Bertie leaned on Lansdowne to accept his nominations for key diplomatic posts.30 Bertie was instrumental in shoehorning his protégé Charles Hardinge into high office. As a reward for Hardinge’s work on the 1903 visit to France, Bertie pushed strongly for his appointment as ambassador to St. Petersburg in 1904. Lansdowne agreed, though not without reservations—Hardinge was not yet due for this senior promotion.31 Hardinge wrote from St. Petersburg to Knollys: “My appointment has been regarded as due entirely to the King’s initiative, and as a guarantee of peace and of more friendly relations between the two Governments.”32
In the autumn of 1905, Bertie helped secure yet another promotion for Hardinge, who leapfrogged to the very top job of head of the Foreign Office. Hardinge wrote thanking Knollys for the part he had played in engineering the move: “I would be grateful … if you would seize a suitable opportunity to tell the King how thankful I am for His Majesty’s gracious intervention on my behalf.” When Benckendorff expressed a fear that Hardinge’s recall implied a cooling of Britain’s attitude toward Russia, Hardinge reassured him. “I explained to him the object and motives of my appointment to the FO at a moment when a change of government is imminent and I pointed out the advantage to the Russian government of having somebody at the FO who is friendly disposed towards them.”33
Bertie wanted Hardinge in London because he needed someone to act as a handle on the incoming foreign secretary, the inexperienced Edward Grey. Hardinge benefited from the royal patronage, but he and his allies at the Foreign Office had an agenda of their own. With the help of the King’s support, they levered themselves into key positions, purging the old guard that had controlled the FO in Lord Salisbury’s day and creating a strongly anti-German climate.34
At the Foreign Office after 1906, Charles Hardinge dominated the inexperienced Edward Grey in a way that would have been unthinkable in the days of Salisbury or Lansdowne.35 With the King, he made himself indispensable; he was effectively the King’s minister. He corresponded frequently with Bertie and also with Knollys, short-circuiting Grey and giving the King detailed intelligence.
Hardinge insisted that all communication between the King and the Foreign Office should go through the “proper channels.” This was code for cutting out the King’s friend Esher, who was politically a Tory. When Esher on behalf of the King asked for information about the Baghdad Railway, Hardinge minuted Knollys: “We cannot possibly admit Esher’s interference in our Foreign Office affairs.” If the King wants information, “we look to receiving a request for it through the proper channel,” that is, Knollys himself. “Sir Edward Grey feels very strongly that Esher is not the proper channel between him and the King.”36 Hardinge accompanied the King on all his meetings with the kaiser or other monarchs, filling the place of the foreign secretary as minister in attendance. He used the royal connection to gain access to the kaiser that would otherwise have been impossible for an official. Bertie discussed foreign questions with Hardinge in a way that he did with no one except Knollys. He would talk to ministers or ambassadors without admitting their argument. As his assistant private secretary Arthur Davidson wrote, “The King never allowed himself to go beyond generalities in either writing or speaking.… His mind and his brain took in everything although his lips were silent.” The discussions came later with Knollys or Hardinge, but never with his informant. “That is why the King always scored, and therein his difference from the German Emperor who always answered, always discussed and always failed.” The King’s letters were “banal to a degree,” but this was intentional; the only people to whom he opened up on paper were Hardinge and Knollys.37
The January 1906 election gave the Liberals a landslide victory, reducing the Conservatives to a rump of 157. “What a terribly radical speech the King had to make at the opening of Parliament,” commented the Princess of Wales to her aunt Augusta. “How he must have hated it.”38 King Edward’s correspondence with his prime minister reveals his attempts to apply the brakes. Like Queen Victoria, the King demanded to be kept informed, but in this respect Campbell-Bannerman turned out to be little better than Balfour. His Cabinet reports, penned in crabbed and shaky black ink, were perfunctory, sometimes only half a sheet of notepaper. The King’s irritable comments, penciled on slips of paper, are bound beside them in the archive. “The information as usual is meagre.”39 CB’s jottings were meant to forestall intervention by the King by preventing him from knowing what was going on; it is sobering to reflect that these scrappy notes form the sole official record of the 1906 Liberal Cabinet.
No doubt the seventy-year-old prime minister was feeling his years. As Esher wrote, “The influence of age is upon him.… He cannot bring himself to write. It thoroughly bores him.”40 But Bertie suspected that he was being deliberately kept in the dark. He was especially annoyed by the radical speeches of Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. When Lloyd George blustered about the creation of a minister for Wales, the King expostulated: “I have heard nothing on the subject from the Prime Minister! This proceeding is most unconstitutional, and I cannot pass over it in silence.”41 CB apologized and, smooth as ever, explained: “I ought to have been more on the spot,” but his wife was seriously ill and he nursed her day and night.42 The King was not mollified. “It seems inconceivable that the P. M. has so little control over the members of his Cabinet,” he harrumphed. “The excuse he gives for Mr. L. G. is a very meagre one.”43
Even more of a thorn in the royal flesh was Winston Churchill. Bertie watched with displeasure when the bumptious, self-seeking Churchill defected from the Tories and joined the Liberals in search of promotion, and he was “disgusted” by Churchill’s “crude and vulgar” attacks on Balfour in 1905.44 He was disgusted, too, by his behavior in office after 1905. Churchill behaved like a rebellious son, anxious for the King’s approval and validation as well as his patronage, yet unable to resist pushing the boundaries and provoking a reaction. As colonial undersecretary, Churchill handled the granting of self-government to South Africa, and at the end of 1906 he wrote the King a thirty-five-page letter explaining his reasons for allowing the Boers the vote under the new constitution. Bertie’s reply ended with a sentence drafted by Ponsonby but amended in pencil by Bertie (his words are given in italics): “His Majesty is glad to see that you are becoming a reliable Minister and above all a serious politician which can only be attained by putting country above party.”45
That winter of 1905–6, the King visited Agnew’s Gallery on Bond Street, where he spent half an hour alone with Velázquez’s painting of a nude Venus. Agnew’s had bought the masterpiece from the cash-strapped owner of Rokeby Park in Teesside, and the newly founded National Art Collections Fund launched an appeal to buy it for the National Gallery. In early January 1906, the fund announced that they had failed to raise the £45,000 that Agnew’s asked for, and the press reported that the Velázquez was lost to the nation. A few weeks later came the surprise announcement that, thanks to an anonymous donor, the painting had been saved. In spite of demands for transparency, the committee of the fund refused to reveal the identity of the last-minute savior of the Rokeby Venus. Not until 1996 was the secret uncovered. A letter was found, pasted into the committee’s minute book, written on Buckingham Palace paper by the banker and collector Robert Benson, who was treasurer of the fund. It read as follows: “When you see Mr. Lockett Agnew at 11 a.m. about the Velasquez Venus with the Mirror you are at liberty to tell him that Major Holford mentioned the position to His Majesty who was much interested.”46 Holford was Benson’s brother-in-law, also a collector and an equerry. On behalf of the King, Benson undertook to subscribe £8,000 and guarantee a further £5,000 for twelve months, making the purchase possible. In May 1906, the King became patron of the fund.
Velázquez’s painting of the luscious back view of a fleshy nude lying on her side and holding a mirror excited a storm of controversy. Moralists attacked it as indecent; Lord Ronald Gower, art critic and homosexual, revolted perhaps by the female bott
om, thundered against the folly of buying such a painting for a public gallery. Bertie, on the other hand, surely agreed with Lady Colin Campbell, who praised the “radiant warmth of the dimpled flesh.”47 Nowadays, perhaps, he preferred power to sex, but his secret gift of the Venus shows that he was indifferent neither to art nor to female beauty.
The Rokeby Venus had a life of its own. It became an icon of Edwardian sexuality, polarizing attitudes toward women. In May 1914, a suffragette named Mary Richardson slashed the canvas with a butcher’s cleaver. She claimed she was protesting against the government’s harsh treatment of the suffragette Mrs. Pankhurst, but as an old woman she admitted: “I didn’t like the way men visitors gawped at it all day long.”48
Bertie was vehemently opposed to women’s suffrage. He ticked off the prime minister, Campbell-Bannerman, for supporting the Women’s Franchise Bill in 1907, which he thought “undignified.”49 As for the suffragettes, their campaign was “outrageous and does their cause (for which I have no sympathy) much harm.”50 Yet this was the son of one of the most powerful women in British history, and the brother of an intellectual woman who was a key player in German politics. A man who despised his beautiful wife as bird-brained, respected his daughter-in-law Princess Mary for her intelligence, and relied heavily on the political advice of his shrewd mistress, Alice Keppel, could hardly be described as contemptuous of women’s ability or education. But he had no time for the New Woman and remained firmly attached to the Victorian idea of separate spheres. When Daisy Warwick made speeches, he wrote: “Why on earth do you want women to be like men and copy their pursuits? God put you into the world to be different from us but you don’t seem to see it!”51
In November 1905, Bertie fell down a rabbit hole while out shooting at Windsor and tore his Achilles tendon. Dr. Treves gave him an iron splint, and he hobbled painfully wearing this contraption. This did not stop him shooting. A specially constructed pony carriage conveyed him to his stand, where the pony was unharnessed, and the King shot sitting in the carriage.52 He managed to kill 120 pheasants at Hall Barn in this way.53 The royal physician Sir Felix Semon became concerned in February when an attack of bronchitis “threatened to involve the circulatory system,” and on Semon’s advice, the King traveled to Biarritz.54
The Hôtel du Palais at Biarritz was a brand-new French chateau poised on the very edge of the Atlantic coast. It was built on the site of the Empress Eugénie’s palace, which had burned down in 1903. From his ground-floor rooms the King found the continual roll of the Atlantic “not unpleasant”; he worked on his government boxes in the sea air, beneath a striped canopy erected on the terrace.55 Mrs. Keppel and her children stayed nearby as the guests of Ernest Cassel in the Villa Eugénie. Once the property of the Prince Imperial, the villa reminded Sonia Keppel of “a large, uninhabited conservatory, with carpetless floors and glass doors, and with its inmates potted about in it like plants.”56 Assorted duchesses gathered nearby, providing bridge and entertainment; among them was Consuelo, Duchess of Manchester, who had been newly restored to favor. Her son had gone down on bended knee in the street to beg Bertie’s forgiveness for his mother, who had been banished ever since Daisy Warwick had got rid of the Americans.57
Biarritz was perfectly positioned for Bertie’s dynastic diplomacy. Princess Beatrice’s daughter, Ena, had become engaged to King Alfonso of Spain, and Bertie did what he could to help place his niece on the Spanish throne. When Alfonso insisted that Ena should convert to Catholicism, Bertie ignored Protestant demands that he should withhold his consent, and appealed to the Lord Chancellor, Lord Loreburn, who ruled that the 1772 Royal Marriages Act, which required that marriages of descendants of George III receive the consent of the ruling monarch, did not apply to Princess Ena because she was a Battenberg.58 Stamper, who had driven the royal cars out from England, accompanied the King on a visit to Alfonso at San Sebastián. The King laughed at the soldiers guarding the route, who lolled casually in the sun, smoking cigarettes. His car was mobbed by a hysterical crowd; at one point twenty people clung to the back, and Bertie had to be rescued by Sergeant Quin of the Criminal Investigation Department, who drove his car within a few inches of the King’s.59 The incompetence of Spanish security was shockingly revealed at Ena’s wedding in Madrid in May, when a terrorist threw a bomb that missed the royal couple but killed people in the crowd, spattering the bride’s dress with blood.
Only a week after Ena’s wedding, Bertie’s daughter Maud was crowned Queen of Norway, marking yet another success for Bertie’s dynasty building. When the union of Norway and Sweden was peacefully dissolved in 1905, Bertie had pushed Maud’s husband, Prince Charles of Denmark, to grasp the Norwegian throne, though the British government was strictly neutral. The Danish claim was opposed by Kaiser William, who wanted a pro-German Norway. Charles was a reluctant candidate, and Bertie had to bully him. “The moment has now come for you to act or lose the Crown of Norway,” he wired. “I urge you to go at once to Norway, with or without the consent of the Danish government.”60 In November 1905, Prince Charles was elected King Haakon VII of Norway.
The kaiser, meanwhile, had held a secret meeting with the czar. In July, the two emperors arranged a yachting rendezvous at Björkö, in the Gulf of Finland. Giving their ministers the slip, Willy and Nicky were reunited like gleeful schoolboys. They grumbled about Uncle Bertie, who they agreed was the “arch-intriguer” and “mischief maker.” Willy complained about Bertie’s “absolute passion for making ‘a little agreement’ with every country, everywhere.” Nicky replied, banging the table: “Well, I can only say, he shall not get one from me, and never in my life against Germany—my word of honour on it.”61 Whereupon Willy produced a paper from his pocket, and invited Nicky to sign a treaty with Germany.
Dismissed by the foreign ministers of both Russia and Germany, the treaty was never ratified, and Björkö has been described by one historian as a “fantasy of autocratic effectiveness.”62 Whether or not Bertie knew about it, he made no attempt to conceal his irritation with William. The Foreign Office quaked. Foreign secretary Lansdowne blamed the King for a worsening of relations with the kaiser: “He talks and writes about his Royal Brother in terms which makes one’s flesh creep, and the official papers which go to him whenever they refer to H. I. M., come back with all sorts of accusations of a most incendiary character.”63
Charles Hardinge, however, considered that King Edward “thoroughly understood” the emperor. “He knew his weaknesses, his vanity and his duplicity. He realised the Kaiser’s jealousy of his own position and influence in Europe and the danger to be apprehended from the Kaiser’s megalomania.”64 Touchy and volatile, lurching from grandiose swagger to kitsch homeliness and mawkish sentimentality, from bullying aggression to hypersensitive paranoia, the kaiser baffled his contemporaries and remains an enigma today.65
Like a fat old cat playing with an angry mouse, Bertie manipulated William and worked on his emotions. In January 1906, shortly after the opening of the Algeciras Conference to resolve the dispute between Germany and France over Morocco, Bertie wrote his nephew a birthday letter. “We are—my dear William—such old friends and near relations that I feel sure that the affectionate feelings which have always existed may invariably continue. Most deeply do I deplore the uncalled-for expressions made use of in the Press concerning our two countries and most ardently do I trust that they will cease.”66 To Kaiser William this appeal, however insincere, was impossible to resist. Assuring his uncle that “my life’s endeavour” was to achieve a mutual understanding between their two countries (which at one level was the truth), William begged him to remember the “silent hours when we watched and prayed” at the bedside of dear Grandmama, “when the spirit of that great Sovereign-Lady passed away, as she drew her last breath in my arms. I feel sure that from the home of Eternal Light she is now looking down upon us and will rejoice when she sees our hands clasped in cordial and loyal friendship.”67
At Biarritz in the spring of 1906, Bertie receiv
ed “concise and most interesting” letters from Hardinge, updating him on the negotiations at Algeciras.68 William’s designs to isolate France collapsed like a house of cards as England and Russia stood by their ally. Germany suffered a humiliating diplomatic defeat. William angrily blamed Bertie, as did his ministers and the German press.69 King Edward, sitting beside the sea at Biarritz, going on motor picnics with Mrs. Keppel, had, in fact, done nothing at Algeciras.70
Mrs. Keppel preserved the menu that the King wrote for dinner on the last evening of his stay at Biarritz: scrambled eggs aux fines herbes, fillet of sole, lamb chops, creamed spinach, chicken, roast woodcock, and peach tart.71 After this light meal, Bertie departed without his mistress for a month’s Mediterranean cruise with his wife. Alix was mourning her father King Christian. Looking “very sad & tired after her great sorrow,” “Motherdear” was anxious to see her brother Willie, the King of Greece, but this was no relaxing family holiday.72 The Uncle of Europe was on a mission to sort out another errant nephew: Prince George of Greece, whose arbitrary rule as High Commissioner of Crete had driven the people to the edge of rebellion.
The royal yacht Victoria and Albert was truly a floating court. The King insisted on the strict observance of protocol. At Corfu, Lord Charles Beresford, the Admiral of the Mediterranean Fleet, arrived with his fleet to escort the Victoria and Albert to Athens. When the King of Greece boarded his flagship, Beresford failed to change into full dress uniform. When Bertie heard of this solecism he ordered Charles Hardinge to make a formal complaint to the Admiralty. Whether or not it was a calculated insult, the uniform gaffe was badly timed. Charlie Beresford was embroiled in an ugly quarrel with Admiral John (Jackie) Fisher, and Bertie read his flouting of protocol as a challenge.
